Dame Judi makes merry in sorry Wives' tale

Wednesday 13 December 2006 00:00 BST

Dame Judi Dench with Simon Callow in The Merry Wives Of Windsor

While an epidemic of song and dance productions spreads through the West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company embarks on an expensive gamble, takes leave of the straight stuff and inflicts this flamboyantly awful, musical version of The Merry Wives Of Windsor upon us.

I came out whistling in the dark, lamenting the poverty of music and songs and the lumbering, heavy-handed performance-style.

Gregory Doran, adaptor and director of what is surely Shakespeare's weakest play, describes this farcical-comedy of social come-uppance as a "great Shakespearean orange" from which he, the composer Paul Englishby and lyricist Ranjit Bolt have laboured for two years, "trying to extract all the juice".

On the evidence of last night's performance the trio have little more to show for their commitment than dryish segments, with excess pips and peel.

The Merry Wives Of Windsor, in which John Falstaff aims to seduce either the married Mistress Ford or her friend Mistress Page and altogether misses, was turned operatic by both Verdi and Vaughan Williams in their highly individual styles. By contrast Englishby's untuneful score is, as Dryden wrote in one of his famous sneers, "everything by starts and nothing long".

Tap, tango and beating time on pots and pans add to the mixed stylistic effect. The lyrics of Ranjit Bolt, an experienced translator but new to song-writing, constitute a wit-free zone in which you are left to wander, savouring phrases of choice ineptitude: "Mix our souls in mutual bliss" "my heart is ready to crack" and "you shine so dazzling and so bright" are just a few of the assorted horrors.

In the course of three hours there are only three minutes of musical and emotional impact. Unsurprisingly Judi Dench supplies all of them. Aproned, vigorous and disguised in a cute wig of frizzy halforange curls, Dame Judi, who is wasted as Mistress Quickly, French Dr Caius's housekeeper, three-quarters speaks and a quarter sings Honeysuckle Villain.

She beautifully delivers this poignant lament for her broken heart and its nonchalant breaker, Simon Callow's vastly upholstered, swaggering and excessively blustering Sir John Falstaff, before happily disappearing with Brendan O'Hea's Pistol who looks young enough to be her son and old enough to know better.

The production, which undercuts the socially pointed comedy with farcical caricature, is confusingly set in a no-man's land. Stephen Brimson Lewis's Elizabethan houses and rural backcloths are offset by costuming of all periods.

The dull Mistresses Ford and Page (Alexandra Gilbreath and Haydn Gwynne), who are never gleeful enough about their Falstaff baiting, are got up in Fifties dresses.

Alistair McGowan's unconvincingly jealous Ford dons Victorian garb and farcically scrabbles like a wild animal through that laundry basket, where Falstaff is thought to be concealed. Ian Conningham's Nym, with his crested hair, looks Seventies punkish.

Doran's irritating, frequent directorial tactic of standing his actors in a virtual row, from where they tend to speak at us rather than to each other, accentuates the production's artificial air, to which only Dame Judi's fine Mistress Quickly proves a spirited, splendid exception.

The Merry Wives Of Windsor Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon